In general, this article agrees with seminal studies emphasizing the role of land armaments by David Stevenson, David G. The methods applied are empirical, comparative, and based on the synthesis of other historians’ work. This article assesses the role of the pre-1914 armaments competition, among many other factors, in helping to bring about the First World War. Myriad factors contributed to the First World War: notions of ethnic/racial superiority and the right - even obligation - to dominate others, mixed contradictorily with fears of relative societal decline an exaggerated need to express manliness through war a deeply rooted and glorified militaristic culture and the pressures of domestic protest movements, which militarists sought to dissipate by re-channeling these tensions outward against foreign enemies. Historians today do not explain the outbreak of war in 1914 as simply the result of international tensions caused by the arms race.

The League of Nations tried to achieve this goal from 1926 to 1935, but it ultimately failed. After the First World War and its nearly 40 million casualties, beliefs among anti-war activists strengthened that the armaments race had caused the worst war in history, and that arms reductions remained the best guarantor of peace. In early 1914, British First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill (1874–1965) observed that “the world is arming as it has never armed before.” Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (1862–1933) agreed, lamenting that “excessive expenditure on armaments, carried to an extensive degree, must lead to a catastrophe,” and adding that he saw “very little to be done” to prevent the impending cataclysm.

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